Tana’s Law of SAHM & Productivity
Oct 19th, 2005 by Tana
Here is Tana’s Law of being a SAHM (or stay-at-home-parent) and productivity: your attention span is equal to the attention span of your youngest child.
What does that have to do with productivity? Well, if your youngest child’s attention span is only thirty seconds, you are going to find yourself doing a lot of flitting around. In that mode, keeping the house clean and getting things done is a lot different than when it’s just you and you can focus on something for two hours without being interrupted or, quite frankly, distracting yourself.
Take laundry, for example. If it’s just you, you can write “laundry” on your to-do list and it will probably get done. But if you have children, you are constantly being distracted by what they are doing and it is going to be a much more challenging task. The FlyLady talks about doing something for just fifteen minutes. Well, I’m sorry, but fifteen minutes is an eternity for a toddler, and as the mother of a toddler, there is no way I could commit to doing just one thing for fifteen minutes.
So what do I do? I break the task down into chunks that match my toddler’s attention span. With the laundry, one task is to get the dirty clothes out of the laundry hamper in my room. That’s all. Just get them. The next task is to take them downstairs to the laundry room. Once that is accomplished, I can sort them (another 30 second task). At that point, the next step is to select a load and put it in the washer. If I’m really on a roll, I can actually start the washer. Wow! I am doing laundry!
This would be why my goal every day is to do one load of laundry. If I get three done (on rare occasion), that is great. But if I get just one done, I am very proud of myself.
Now for cleaning, I can either have my toddler help me (which doubles the time it takes to do anything) or I can try to do it quickly in small spurts. Take cleaning the bathroom. Step 1) Clear items off the sink. Step 2) Get cleaning rag and cleanser out. Step 3) Actually clean the sink – this step actually requires a bit of focus but can be done in about 30 seconds. Step 4) Wipe down toilet. Step 5) Put toilet cleaner in bowl, scrub toilet bowl and flush. Time to complete these four steps (from when step one is started to when step four is complete): can be as long as four hours. But who cares how long it took? The bathroom is clean!
To those who have never been a SAHM with small children, I probably sound like the epitome of incompetence. I mean, does it really take four hours to clean a bathroom? To them I say, check out my girlfriends houses (fellow SAHMS) and see how clean their homes are – then you will give me credit for getting the job done, regardless of the method actually used to complete it.